Whip

A whip count is a living tally of where each office stands on a bill or ask you are working. Where a spreadsheet freezes a snapshot, Apogee keeps a position ledger: every member or target has a current position, a history of how they moved, and the evidence behind each change. It is the count of your Policy Graph, and it stays private to your account.

Everything in a whip count is yours alone. Positions are never shared with other users and never aggregated across accounts.

When to use a whip

Reach for a whip count whenever the question is "where are we on this vote?" rather than "what does the record say?":

Counting yes, no, lean, and undecided across the members on a bill
Tracking how an office moved, and what moved them, over the life of a campaign
Working a list of business-development targets by warmth rather than vote stance
Keeping a shared team read on a count without losing who is responsible for each row

Building a whip count

A whip count works conversationally. From a whip workspace, describe what you are counting and Apogee sets up the ledger:

"Start a whip count on HR 5 for the members on Energy and Commerce"

"Mark Rep. Khanna as a lean yes after today's call"

"Where are we on the whip?"

Positions can be set in plain language in chat, or by clicking the position pill directly on the count. Both paths land through the same ledger, so the count reads the same however you update it.

Positions over time

Every position is recorded bitemporally: Apogee stores both when a stance became true in the world and when you recorded it. A change never overwrites the past. Instead it appends a new entry with the actor, the evidence, and a written note of what moved, so the count can answer "where do we stand today" and "how did we get here" from the same ledger.

Two rules keep the count trustworthy:

Your writes win. When Apogee finds fresh signal on the public record, it never overwrites a position you set by hand. It attaches the new reasoning as a suggestion and flags the row as worth a look, leaving your read in place until you decide.
Provenance travels with the position. Whether a stance came from you, from a pasted email, or from the official record, that source is captured at entry and stays attached to the row.

The three views

A whip count is more than a table. Apogee renders it three ways:

Count - the roll-up and the sortable ledger, with the rationale and provenance behind each position. Filter to the rows that need attention, or sort by who was touched last.
Pulse - the read-only view of what the count is watching, the reasoning it runs, and the recent activity that has moved the ledger.
History - the append-only audit log of every move: who changed, when, on what evidence, and whether a person or Apogee made the change.

Importing from a spreadsheet

If a count already lives in a CSV or an Excel file, Apogee can migrate it. Paste the sheet or upload the file and Apogee parses it, proposes a mapping from your columns to positions, and resolves the names to members and targets before writing anything. It shows the proposed result first and applies only the rows you confirm.

Because an import is treated as historical data, it fills empty and machine-set rows but never clobbers a position you have already set by hand. Rows it cannot map, and rows that would overwrite your own intel, are surfaced for you to resolve rather than guessed.

How People feeds the whip

A whip count is wired to your People network. When you count members, Apogee reads the relationships you have logged to show who to lean on and who is within reach of a target. An interaction you record with an office can inform the position on that office, and a member you are counting stays connected to the calls, meetings, and follow-ups you already track.

Privacy

A whip count is part of the private layer of Apogee. Your positions, notes, and the evidence behind them are scoped to your account and never mix with another user's data. On Teams and Enterprise plans, only what you explicitly place in shared memory is visible to teammates; your whip positions stay yours. See People privacy for details.